Ezra Levant challenges the World Economic Forum’s claim that technology will render millions "useless," citing Yuval Noah Harari’s warnings about a consumption-dependent class and Bill Gates’ population reduction remarks. While Conrad Black’s June 21 keynote traces Canada’s civil liberties to British governance and Laurier’s secularist policies, Levant criticizes modern institutions for allegedly sidelining broader rights in favor of Indigenous issues. Pulowski’s Calgary trial—feeding homeless attendees steak despite COVID rules—exposits clashes over religious freedom, free speech, and assembly, questioning whether governments prioritize symbolic enforcement over real justice. [Automatically generated summary]
Today we would look into who Yuval Noah Harari is.
Who is that you say?
I'd say he's Klaus Schwab's Muse at the World Economic Forum.
I'm going to play about six or seven video clips where he outlines his theories, including that most people are useless.
That's ahead, but first let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
That's the video version of this podcast.
I think it's really valuable so you get a feeling for this Yuval Noah Harari.
I'm going to show some video clips.
Obviously, you'll hear it on the podcast, but I'd like you to see it too.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com and click subscribe eight bucks a month.
You get the video version of my show every weekday, plus four weekly shows we do.
That's RebelNewsPlus.com.
here's today's podcast.
Tonight, is it true that technology will make millions or billions of people useless?
That's what the World Economic Forum says.
It's June 8th.
This is the Ezra Levant Show.
shame on you you censorious bug i'm so proud of the journalism our team did in switzerland covering the world economic forum and the world health organization A lot of great videos.
My favorite was when Abhi Yamini, our chief Australian correspondent, accosted the United Nations envoy for COVID-19, David Nabarro is his name.
Here's a short clip of that.
I Don't Trust Journalists00:15:36
Hello, so you're from the WHO, the special envoy for COVID.
I'm just going to a meeting, actually.
It's nice of you to talk to me.
I'm not doing that other thing at the moment, COVID at the moment.
I'm just walking to a meeting about food.
But I guess you're at the WEF, you're an invite.
Sorry?
You're invited to the forum?
Yes, but I'm certainly invited to the forum.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can see my badge.
Yeah, so why do you think this year it's about, they're talking about the fact that they're regaining trust.
Do you think it has anything to do with the WHO?
So, I mean, for me, trust has been difficult to maintain with COVID, but you have to tell me who you're reporting for.
Rebel News.
Sorry?
Rebel News.
Why do you think people don't trust?
It's been hard to maintain trust through COVID.
Because COVID's affected poor people everywhere really badly.
So why do so many people blame your organization, the WHO?
People like to find somebody to blame.
Was lockdowns ever a good idea?
Well, lockdowns are part of the response, but we say there are things that you can do before you lock down that reduce the degree of problem.
So we've always said lockdown is the last resort.
And of course we worry if we think some countries really what?
Do you think Victoria, do you think in Australia they had the largest, harshest lockdown?
Do you think that they locked down too much and they were too severe?
I do not like commenting on decisions of individual governments.
They have to take account of the local circumstances.
There's no hard and fast rule.
And so I will not answer the question by agreeing with your statement.
I'm just saying that.
But they say they followed your advice.
That's for them.
This is why a lot of people blame the WHO is because governments put it in on you.
Of course.
WHO is owned by 194 governments.
And there will be some who don't agree with others.
And that's normal.
It's a really good interview, I thought.
If you haven't seen it yet, please go to WEFREPORTS.com.
Real journalism, well over a million views of that conversation between our different platforms.
Think about that.
There's a craving for real journalism about the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization.
And yet there were no mainstream media covering those events.
Why?
The only mainstream media who were there were there as paying sponsors and participants like the New York Times.
Rebecca, how are you doing from the New York Times?
Can I ask you a quick question, as Avi from Rebel News?
How is the public meant to believe that the New York Times is here to actually ask the tough questions when you're here as an invited guest?
How are people meant to rely on the mainstream media?
If you wouldn't mind, we just, if you could give us, you know, thank you.
You don't want to explain to people why we should trust the mainstream media?
No, of course, no comment.
As you can see, Avi was a shining star, so much so that he was invited on GB News, the new freedom-oriented TV network on the UK, last night on their flagship show.
Here's a clip of that.
Avi, you had a very interesting time in Davos.
Why did you feel it was important to scrutinize these elites who are running organizations like the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization?
Well, I guess, firstly, thanks for having me.
It wasn't my idea.
Ezra, our boss at Rebel News, the news, it was his plan.
And I think his gut instinct was spot on.
Basically, we got there and you could see that the most powerful people in the world had their own little safe space there in Stavos, Switzerland, where they were so shocked when any sort of reporter asked them a real question, just like Nabarro there.
Just really great stuff.
Why are people so interested in the World Economic Forum?
One reason is a psychological one.
When the experts and the elites and the official people tell you not to be interested in it, that to be interested in it is a conspiracy theory.
Well, there's a reverse psychology there.
If you're telling me not to look at something, now I want to look at it because you're not the boss of me.
It's like that media party reporter from Global News.
Remember her?
I spent the last week doing a deep dive into the Great Reset after Pierre Polyev tweeted, Stop the Great Reset.
The idea started at the World Economic Forum, but in the recent months since, some conspiratorially minded circles have baselessly decided the policy proposal is a nefarious evil plot.
I mean, you read that tweet and either you say, okay, I trust this reporter to think for me.
And she says it's a conspiracy theory, a baseless plot.
I mean, she did say she did a deep dive into it.
She didn't go to Davos like we did.
She didn't actually talk to anyone over there, but take it from her.
I mean, you trust her, right?
There's nothing there.
Don't pay any attention to the Great Reset.
It's one approach in life.
The other is to say, Gene, sounds controversial at the very least, and actually sort of interesting, almost like a bond villain stuff.
I'll look into it myself.
Thank you very little, because I'm curious, and there are some odd things out there.
I don't quite trust journalists.
I guess it depends on if you're a critical thinker, an independent thinker, or maybe you just don't care about politics and ideas.
You're too busy in life doing real things like living, working, raising a family.
You don't have time for such things at all.
But seriously, just taking the word of a self-proclaimed expert, fact-checker, who says you're nuts for caring about it.
Well, that doesn't work on me, or I suspect many Rebel News viewers.
I mean, does this Bond villain character, Klaus Schwab, not at least make you curious when he says that he has infiltrated governments around the world, including Canada?
What we are very proud of now is a young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina, and so on, so he penetrates the cabinets.
So yesterday I was at a researcher at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau.
And I would know that half of this cabinet, or even more, half of this cabinet are for our actually young noble leaders of the world.
The funny thing is, if you agree with the World Economic Forum, you can say it exists if you agree with that.
If you disagree with it, if you criticize it, then they say you're a conspiracy theorist for saying it exists at all.
It's so weird.
But I want to focus for a moment not on Klaus Schwab, the boss of the World Economic Forum, but on his rising star, also a character from a Bond movie.
His name is Yuval Noah Harari.
He's a bit of an odd duck.
He's a bit of a futurist, if you know what I mean by that.
Someone who makes predictions about the future and has lots of opinions on what we should do as a broad society.
He fancies himself a master of the universe, a mini Klaus Schwab.
He was born to a Jewish family, but he's effectively renounced Judaism.
And I think it's fair to say any belief in God, any religion.
He meditates every day, he says.
He just thinks to himself quietly, it's different than praying.
He says he meditates for an hour at the beginning of the day and an hour at the end of the day.
He's vegan, of course.
He says he doesn't have a smartphone.
I think calling him quirky would be a bit of an understatement.
Now, we're all quirky in our own ways, and maybe I should spend some time calmly meditating too.
I'm sure my wife would love it if I threw away my smartphone, but I don't think you can be in the journalism business and do that.
None of that is what bothers me about him, but it adds a bit of context to what he does say and do that does bother me.
I want to show you a bit about him, but because as his boss, Klaus Schwab says, the WEF, the World Economic Forum, for which he offers opinions, they have penetrated the cabinets of many countries in the world, including Canada.
So what he says is relevant to you.
Now, I'm going to play some video clips of him.
Now, some of them I can only find on YouTube channels that are very critical of this guy.
And they have, in some cases, put words on the screen that some commentator has added that I don't necessarily agree with.
I wouldn't put them on the screen.
Some of them have a little bit of sound effects to them that I probably wouldn't add.
But these are the best clips I can find easily.
Again, not my editorial garnishes on them like the sound effects, but I want to show you who he is.
Let's start with something I can sort of identify with.
He explains why he doesn't have a smartphone.
I do, but I understand his thinking.
Take a look.
And enough computing power?
We are very close to the point when computers can hack human beings, can understand my emotions, my likes, and my dislikes better than me.
Not perfect.
You can never hack something 100%.
You don't need 100%.
You just need to know people better than they know themselves.
And this is quite easy because most people don't know themselves very well.
So just imagine what happens when we pass the...
So as soon as the algorithm knows what I want better than I know it?
You're a puppet.
It can manipulate you.
It can press your emotional buttons.
And this is what is happening now with our smartphones and all these algorithms on social media.
Is that why you don't have a smartphone?
No, that's one of the reasons.
Basically, it's to keep my time.
And over the last 20 years, the smartest people in the world and the best technology in the world has been working on the problem of how to hack human beings and control them through the screens and through the smartphones.
I'm no match to them.
If I give them access, they win.
So I try to limit their access.
In that way.
In that way.
I can sympathize.
He's identified a problem, a problem for himself, but his prescriptions for the world, his whole set of idea, of ideas, is how to deploy that same technology that he himself won't let be used on him, how to deploy it on the masses.
Sometimes it sounds like he's making a pessimistic prediction, but sometimes it sounds like he's really excited about the brave new world we're going into.
Like this.
After thousands of years, during which humans were the rulers of the world, authority and power will shift away from humans to computers, and most humans will become economically useless and politically powerless.
Already today, we are beginning to see the creation of a new class of humans, the useless class.
Just as the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century created the new working class, the proletariat, so now the artificial intelligence revolution is beginning to create the useless class.
I'm going to come back to that in a moment.
The useless class.
You're useless.
Your only use, he predicts, will be as a consumer.
Maybe the ultimate destiny of Homo sapiens is just be consumers.
You don't need humans for anything except as consumers.
Here he is suggesting that the purpose in life for the masses will be drugs and computer games.
Again, disregard the commentary on the screen and the sound effects here.
The biggest question maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people.
The problem is more boredom and what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless.
My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for more.
It's already happening under different titles, different headings.
You see more and more people spending more and more time or solving their inner problems with drugs and computer games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs.
You look at Japan today, and Japan is maybe 20 years ahead of the world in everything, and you see all these new social phenomenon of people having relationships with virtual spouses.
And you have people who never leave the house and just live through computers.
I think once you're superfluous, you don't have power.
Again, we are used to the age of the masses of the 19th and 20th century, where You saw all these successful, massive uprisings, revolutions, revolts.
So we are used to thinking about the masses as powerful.
But this is basically a 19th century and 20th century phenomenon.
I don't think that the masses, even if they somehow organize themselves, stand much of a chance.
We are not in Russia of 1917 or in 19th century Europe.
What we are talking about now is like a second industrial revolution, but the product this time will not be textiles or machines or vehicles or even weapons.
The product this time will be humans themselves.
We are basically learning to produce bodies and minds.
Bodies and minds are going to be, I think, the two main products of the next wave of all these changes.
That is optional.
Again, and if you think about it from the viewpoint of the poor, it looks terrible.
There's some truth there.
People are mesmerized by computer games.
Pornography has replaced human interaction.
What happens when computer games combine with pornography and artificial intelligence and those virtual reality goggles?
I think for too many people that would be a tempting alternative to a miserable life they might live in the real world, the world the World Economic Forum is contemplating where you will own nothing and you'll be happy just as long as you get your drugs and your virtual reality porn and consume.
The Digital Transformation00:04:00
This is really exciting to Harari, by the way.
Just, you know, think about sex life.
Almost every religion and every ideology wanted to really change human sexuality or limit it, but they couldn't.
You had vows of chastity in the church, and how many people actually lived up to the vows of chastity?
Now think if you can really start messing with human biology, what will be the result of these sexual fantasies of different religions and ideologies?
Harari says people are hackable, like computers.
That's the new thing.
And again, there are grains of truth in what he says.
For example, Apple's watch, I wear one, it tracks your heart rate.
A lot of people have wearable tech with a medical purpose.
How far away is that from injectable tech?
A lot of dogs have an injectable chip that replaces a dog collar.
Here's the head of Pfizer, Albert Burla, talking at the World Economic Forum about a pill that you'll take with a chip in it that will transmit a report to authorities if you took your medicine or not.
It is basically a biological chip that it is in the tablet.
And once you take the tablet and dissolves into your stomach, sends a signal that you took the tablet.
So imagine the applications of that, compliance.
The insurance companies to know that the medicines that patients should take, they do take them.
It is fascinating what happens in this field.
I see these dark things on the horizon.
I see some of them hastened by COVID, by vaccine passports, by government apps, by surveillance.
Here's Harari saying, yeah, that was COVID's role.
Science is not really a thing.
At least this is my view as a historian.
Science is not really about truth.
It's about power.
I think maybe in a couple of decades when people look back, the thing they will remember from the COVID crisis is this is the moment when everything went digital.
And this was the moment when everything became monitored, that we agreed to be surveyed all the time, not just in authoritarian machines, but even in democracies.
And maybe most importantly at all, this was the moment when surveillance started going under the skin.
Because really we haven't seen anything yet.
I think the big process that's happening right now in the world is hacking human beings, the ability to hack humans, to understand deeply what's happening within you, what makes you go.
And for that, the most important data is not what you read and who you meet and what you buy, it's what's happening inside your body.
So we had these two big revolutions, the computer science revolution or the infotech revolution and the revolution in the biological sciences.
And they are still separate, but they are about to merge.
They are merging around, I would say, the biometric sensor.
It's the thing, it's the gadget, it's the technology that converts biological data into digital data that can be analyzed by computers.
And having the ability to really monitor people under the skin, this is the biggest game changer of all.
I say again, many of the things, his observations are factually accurate.
Sometimes it's hard to decide, though, if he's just describing things he sees or promoting things he likes.
But he does take strong opinions.
One of his books was called Homo Deus, which means in Latin, man God.
Man is a God, man becomes a God.
Man Becomes God00:02:34
I think he believes that because he wants to be his own God, although he thinks there's no such thing as free will.
Our destiny is to be part of a computer.
Listen to this.
I don't think that the question of, I mean, is very interesting or very central.
It has been central in Western civilization because of some kind of basically theological mistake made thousands of years ago.
But it's really a misunderstanding of the human condition.
We have all this still myth of free will, that everything we choose is of our own free will.
And this is a myth that served us well for a couple of centuries, but now it's becoming dangerous.
Free will, Jesus, hope, belief, he calls that all fake news.
You don't have any answer in the Bible what to do when humans are no longer useful to the economy.
You need completely new ideologies, completely new religions, and they are likely to emerge from Silicon Valley or from Bangalore and not from the Middle East.
And they are likely to give people visions based on technology.
Everything that the old religions promised, happiness and justice and even eternal life, but here on earth with the help of technology and not after death with the help of some supernatural being.
I mean all this story about Jesus rising from the dead and being the Son of God, this is fake news.
There's something terrifying about him and it's something he has in common with other people like Bill Gates, who says we need billions fewer people in the world.
It's an average about five tons for everyone on the planet.
And somehow we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.
It's been constantly going up.
It's only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all.
So we have to go from rapidly rising to falling and falling all the way to zero.
This equation has four factors, a little bit of multiplication.
So you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero.
And that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person's using on average, the energy on average for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy.
Getting CO2 to Zero00:03:38
So let's look at each one of these.
and see how we can get this down to zero.
Probably one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero.
That's back from high school algebra.
But let's take a look.
First, we've got population.
The world today has 6.8 billion people.
That's headed up to about 9 billion.
Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.
But there we see an increase of about 1.3.
The guy who wants to depopulate the world is the guy running the vaccine industry.
Oh, that's good to know.
Why do these elites hate people?
Maybe because they themselves believe in nothing.
Gates believes he is a God.
I think he really believes that.
He literally wants to reshape the world in his own image.
He thinks nothing of the rights of other people.
I mean, remember, his own wife divorced him because he wouldn't stop meeting with the child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, even after he was convicted.
They met dozens of times.
You know, it was also widely reported that Bill had a friendship or business or some kind of contact with Jeffrey Epstein and that you were not, that that was very upsetting to you.
Did that play a role in the divorce at all in this process?
Yeah, as I said, it's not one thing.
It was many things.
But I did not like that he'd had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, though.
Then you made that clear to him.
I made that clear to him.
I also met Jeffrey Epstein exactly one time.
Did you?
Yes, because I wanted to see who this man was.
And I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door.
He was abhorrent.
He was evil personified.
I had nightmares about it afterwards.
So, you know, my heart breaks for these young women because that's how I felt.
And here I'm an older woman.
My God, I feel terrible for those young women.
It was awful.
You felt that the moment you walked in.
It was awful.
Yeah.
And you shared that with Bill and he still continued to spend time with him?
Any of the questions remaining about what Bill's relationship there was, those are for Bill to answer.
Okay.
But I made it very clear how I felt about him.
These people believe in no future, or at least no future for us, other than as consumers, no free will.
We're hackable.
We serve the masters.
We're useless in all other ways.
He sometimes says economically useless, because that's all he care about.
It's useless.
Are you a useless person?
But I think he's wrong.
I think every person has a use.
There's a plan greater than Klaus Schwab's plan, his great reset.
There's a plan greater than Bill Gates' plans.
Every person has a nobility in them, a grace.
Every person is made in God's image.
They have a little spark in them.
Real life and real emotion is better than drugs.
Men and women falling in love and creating families is better than artificial intelligence, virtual reality, porn.
Though he hangs out with billionaires and oligarchs, the meaning of life is actually to be found, I think, in the mass of humanity, in the billions of people teeming, living, wanting to live, wanting to be free, wanting to improve their lot in life, wanting to improve the lives of their children even more, wanting to be more than just a consumer.
Canadians and the Supreme Court00:15:28
It's interesting.
Harari, of course, doesn't have any children himself.
I think Yuval Noah Harari has been spending too much time in places like Davos.
I think he needs to visit with normal people with children.
Not those who hate children, with people who have a sense of purpose.
I don't want to be part of his death cult, his consumer cult.
I don't want to have a microchip in me.
I don't want to be tracked.
I don't consent to surveillance.
I did not consent to COVID surveillance.
Maybe he's just a futurist with an active imagination.
Maybe he's just a storyteller.
Maybe.
But he is the muse for some deeply evil men who have penetrated our governments, including here in Canada.
This is why we talk about the World Economic Forum, because it's interesting, because it could be a danger.
And because we're still, for now, free.
Free to tell some egghead that he might think we're useless, but we don't think that about ourselves.
Stay with us for more.
You know, the Democracy Fund, which, of course, is the Canada Revenue Agency charity that pursues a lot of the civil liberties cases we talk about, they have a new scholar in residence, a historian in residence, my friend Conrad Black.
And exciting news, he is going to give a keynote speech on the history of Canadian civil liberties later this month.
So I'll give you the details in a second.
Welcome back to the show.
Great to see you again.
Thank you, Ezra.
The history of Canadian civil liberties.
I bet a lot of people in Canada say there is no history of civil liberties.
That's an American thing.
There might well be such people, and they may be numerous, but they would not, in that case, be correct.
There is such a history, and it's a distinguished history.
Canada has perhaps a less well-known history in civil liberties because it hasn't been as fiercely contended.
I mean, there have been incidences of abuse of power by governments, but they're rarely as violent or evidently oppressive as in countries that have, for example, a legacy of slavery, that sort of thing.
That's a great point.
Now, I think most Canadians know about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that for many years was called the essential Canadian identity.
Some people a little bit older might remember Diefenbaker's Bill of Rights, even though it didn't have the same constitutional status.
Well, that's the problem.
Civil rights are essentially a provincial matter, not a federal one.
But the history of Canadian civil liberties goes back even before Canada was officially independent, right?
Yes, indeed it does.
Tell us a little bit about it.
I don't want you to give away your speech, and I'm going to tell folks how they can watch that speech on June 21, but give us some ideas of the history.
Well, just to go back to all the way back to the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, so 1759, the British took over what was then Canada.
It was really just Quebec, you know, and the British already had a colony in Nova Scotia and in what was then Acadia, New Brunswick.
But they took over Quebec in 17 in stages, but in the early 1760s, and then officially gained authority over it in 1763.
And the governor, not the very first governor, but the first long-term governor, Sir Guy Carleton, after Carleton University, is named.
Subsequently, his name is Lord Dorchester.
It's the same person.
And of course, they're Dorchester counties and streets and things in various places.
Well, he saw the American Revolution coming, and he was very friendly with the French Canadians, and he liked them, and they liked him.
And he saw that the only way to keep French Canada, Quebec as it now is, from gravitating towards the Americans once the revolution was launched, you could see it coming because of the impasse between the authorities of the American authorities and the British,
was to assure the French Canadians that they could keep their civil law, they could keep their religion, and they could, which was, you know, in the English part of North America, a minority religion at that time, and they could keep the French language.
And that was the great fear the French Canadians had, and they've had intermittently ever since then, of being assimilated, that all of a sudden there wouldn't be enough of them and they wouldn't have enough jurisdiction to protect their culture.
So he promised them that, and on that basis, they were loyal to the British government in the American Revolutionary War and in the War of 1812.
You know, I never thought of it that way.
I always thought of that as, well, let's just come to some compromise to, you know, a political compromise to end a war.
But it wasn't just a political compromise.
It was a promise of civil rights.
A promise of minority rights.
And admittedly, not entirely spontaneously from a love of civil rights as such, perhaps being a psychologist or just to get some quality.
Well, to try and keep Canada in the British Empire as the Americans might be departing the British Empire.
Now, I mean, the UK has been a fountain of the rule of law.
And, I mean, so many of our freedoms were inherited from the UK.
Yes.
And so were the Americans, by the way.
Right.
In those early days of Canada, did Canadians look to the Americans and say they're freer down there?
Or after the American Revolution, did Canadians say they are freer down there?
We want some of that up here?
Or did they think they're wilder down there?
What do they say?
Well, they thought both.
And they didn't think the second was something that they envied or wanted to emulate.
But they did.
And in particular, the Canadian, the native Canadian authorities, they're not now going past the British governors, but before Canada was independent, Baldwin and La Fontaine, and then MacDonald and Cartier and George Brown, just before Confederation, they were in the delicate position of seeking rights in particular elected,
accountable politicians being in charge of everything except foreign policy, which they conceded at that point was really in the hands of the British.
But everything else, they didn't want a dictation from the British governor.
They wanted to have their own elected officials, as the Americans had, and as the British had after the First Reform Act and in 1832.
So what they were saying was we want the same rights as the British and the Americans, you know, the people have in each place.
But they couldn't, you know, they couldn't agitate too much because if they did, the British, they feared, would make a deal with the Americans and give the Americans Canada in exchange for something else.
So they had to agitate enough to get the attention of the British, but not so much that the British ruling class became exasperated with them.
So you had all these people, Macdonald in particular, traipsing over to England all through the 1840s and 50s and early 60s, trying to persuade Palmerston and Disraeli and Gladstone, these British statesmen, of how to treat Canada fairly.
And he ultimately was successful.
Now, you don't want to put too much, as Shakespeare said, what's in a name.
Just because someone calls himself Conservative Party doesn't mean they are.
You have oxymorons like progressive conservative.
What do you mean?
Those merger two parties.
Well, exactly.
So you don't want to put too much meaning in a name.
But the Liberal Party of Canada, a very old party, the Liberal Party, did that have a meaning in the root of that word, liberty, freedom, the Latin.
That comes from the word for freedom.
Did they historically see themselves as the party of freedom?
To a degree, yes.
They were not a Whig party.
I mean, the British Liberals, Mr. Gladstone's party, had been the Whigs.
And going back to Walpole, and the American Republican Party had been the Whigs under, well, the only presidents they had were William H. Harrison and Zachary Taylor.
But, you know, Henry Clay, for example, is a famous Whig, ran three times for president.
But in Canada, you're quite right.
The Liberal Party wasn't a successor to Whigs, which are really, in Britain, noblemen, but trying to take more rights from the king.
The Liberals were a kind of middle-class party without connections to the aristocracy.
And it was founded by Mr. Blake, who was not successful running twice in general elections against John A. MacDonald.
But he did.
His great contribution to Canada was he effectively chose Laurier as his successor.
But that was their program.
You're right.
It was liberal in the sense of liberalizing.
Yes.
I mean, Laurier, I think he talked about freedom.
Freedom is Canada's nationality.
Freedom is who we are.
I think he meant it.
I sure did.
He certainly did.
Did he do things to promote it?
Did he chide those who would be too authoritarian?
What is his track record as the liberal big boss?
He's still on our money.
He's still hailed as the great liberal of Canadian history.
What did he do for freedom?
Well, a number of things.
He supported the secular egalitarianism of incoming provinces, Manitoba and then later Alberta and Saskatchewan, and overcame what were religious tensions at the time.
Even though, of course, most of his fellow French Canadians were Roman Catholics.
He somewhat demoted the status of the Catholic Church in these new provinces.
Secondly, I mean, not to the point of, you know, he wasn't against religious practice, but he was drawing a clear line between secular and ecclesiastical authority.
And secondly, he was quite adamant in minority rights.
He famously said when a permit for the Salvation Army to stage a parade in Montreal was withheld, he insisted that that be revisited, that they be given the permit.
And he said for all to hear, and it was quoted everywhere in Canada, I will lead that parade myself, if necessary, to demonstrate that all such people have a right peaceably to the public.
That's a great story.
I bet you 99.9% of the Canadians don't know that story.
For him to say, I will be the front of that protest if it's not allowed.
That's almost impossible to imagine.
It was a very brave thing to say.
And he meant it.
And the other thing I would cite is as we got closer to World War I and the tensions in Europe between the alliance of Britain, France, and Russia and the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, and to some degree Italy, became more tense.
The British put great emphasis on imperial solidarity.
They essentially wanted Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa to be extensions of Britain for the purposes of providing money to build navies and provide soldiers and so forth.
And Laurier led the forces at the Empire Premier's meetings, prime minister's meetings, of autonomy for the Dominions and said, you know, look, of course we want to help Britain, but these are our decisions and not yours.
And we're not surrendering that autonomy that we've earned.
And that isn't directly civil liberties in the sense it's usually meant, but it was preserving the collective liberty of this country.
And I would, with that qualification, put it into the category of things responding to your question.
And how about the Supreme Court?
For the longest time in the United States, I don't think the Supreme Court had its power and prestige that it has now.
I mean, there were people who rejected an appointment to the Supreme Court in the States.
I don't think it had the prestige and glamour and power that it's given now.
I think it's fluctuated.
Sometimes it did and sometimes not.
How about in Canada?
I don't think we talk about our Supreme Court a lot, but it actually makes an enormous number of decisions.
And I don't think it's scrutinized as much as the American system is because we don't have the confirmation hearing.
But let me ask you, has it been a force for freedom, or has it been a force putting a break on freedom?
I think in general it has been a force for freedom.
You'll keep in mind that there was an appeal beyond the Supreme Court of Canada to the British, the law lords of the British Privy Council, and that was only abolished in the late 40s.
Mr. King and a lot of pressure from Quebec in that.
And by the way, Quebec wanted to retain that because they thought Quebec historically thought the British, the legal section of the British Privy Council, was a better defender of political rights of the province than the Supreme Court in Ottawa was because, you know, it's appointed, the justices are appointed entirely by the federal government.
But I would say that in general, the Supreme Court has had a good record of defending civil rights in this country.
Definitely so.
And you're quite right.
I mean, the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, under Roger Tawney approved the elaborate regime of chasing fugitive slaves, this kind of thing.
I mean, it was really quite reactionary and reprehensible.
Now, it was all part of a compromise to keep the American Union going for the last 10 years before the Civil War.
But it was a shameful interpretation of the law, in the opinion of posterity.
Well, I'm excited that you are addressing this issue because I feel it's a real gap.
And I think one of the reasons that the last two years, Canada has not fought, in my opinion, hard enough for civil liberties.
There was not enough political opposition to some of the tactics of the lockdowns, that there's not enough opposition to the censorship plans of Trudeau.
I feel it's because certain institutions have forgotten their freedom roots.
Prove Vaxed: Online or In Person?00:03:04
I think that is true, and I'd add one thing.
We have to some extent been sidelined by this issue of the Native people.
And I want to be clear.
I think the Native people have a legitimate grievance, and we have to do better.
I would state that at the outset.
But the courts have become, and not just the Supreme Court, but the Appalach courts generally in the West, have become so preoccupied with these issues that they've focused more on that, and that has tended to diminish the rights of everybody else to some extent.
And I think we've got the tail wagging the dog in some sense.
My point about the Indian Act, as it's still called, is that it is an intolerable restriction on very basic civil rights of people on those bands.
But we'll talk about that another day.
I want to look into the camera and say to folks that Conrad Black is the historian in residence at the Democracy Fund with a focus on the history of Canadian civil liberties.
And he is giving a keynote speech on this subject Tuesday, June 21st at 7.30 p.m. Eastern Time.
Now, if you're in Toronto, you want to be there.
It's at the Carloo, which is a gorgeous building on Young Street, easy to find.
But if you're not in the Toronto area, you can still watch it by Zoom.
So I don't care where you are around the world, you can join in.
It's 11 bucks for an online ticket, 22 bucks to be there in person.
There's also a VIP ticket if you want to come for wine and cheese.
And there's even a small dinner afterwards if you want to follow up on the speech with Conrad Black directly.
Go to thedemocracyfund.ca.
We'll put a link under this video too.
I think it's going to be a great event.
Dr. Julie Panessi is going to be there.
I'll be there, of course.
We've already sent out some emails inviting folks.
Basically, you're going to give a keynote speech on this subject and take questions, right?
Yes.
I think it's going to be great.
So go to thedemocracyfund.ca.
That date again, Tuesday, June 21st.
You can be there in person or online.
Thanks very much for coming in.
Thank you, Ezra.
There you have it.
Stay with us.
Your Letters to Me are next.
Hey, welcome back.
Your Letters to Me.
Robert Hunter says it's happening here in England too.
Massive security checks and four-hour queues, flights constantly being canceled, even after some passengers had boarded.
Okay, I don't know the situation over there, but I think I know one thing.
In the UK, it cannot be attributed to pandemic era regulations.
In Canada, you have to prove that you're vaxed to get on a plane.
You have to prove that you're vaxed to get into the country.
I don't believe those are the rules in the UK, and I know they're not the case for most places in the world.
So there may be problems in the UK, but I would be doubtful that they are as bad as they are in Canada.
Pastor Art's Controversial Protest00:07:05
Could be wrong.
Elizabeth Watts says, this is sick.
Unashamed grooming.
You're talking, of course, about the Drag Queen Story Hour.
This isn't going to end well for our civilization if you can still call it that.
Yeah, and again, for people who are worried about being called homophobic on this, just swap in a heterosexual strip club.
You would never take a 12-year-old girl to a strip club, straight or gay.
What are you doing?
I mean, I thought that was illegal anyways.
Ghost M says, I love how he unmasked the dude.
You're talking about Adam Stein and that Antifa.
That seems to be their worst fear to be exposed since face covering has been normalized only after multiple people had tried to damage his property.
Yeah, he's a real fighter.
He called himself a performance artist.
I liked him.
He's a good talker, and I was delighted to learn he'd be hooked up with the Blaze.
That's our show for today.
What a strange man that Yuval Noah Harari is.
What do you think of that?
Do you think I took the clips out of context?
I don't think I did.
I've watched a lot of him, and I've read not his entire book, but lengthy excerpts.
I'll continue researching the matter, especially since the fancy people say I shouldn't.
That's our show for today until next time, which is tomorrow.
On behalf of all of us here to you and home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.
Sheila Gunread for Rebel News, and I want to give you a quick update about what is happening in a courtroom in Calgary, Alberta this week.
Pastor Art Pulowski is on trial for one ticket relating to an illegal gathering in violation of COVID restrictions in December 2020.
That illegal gathering was an open-air soup kitchen slash Christmas festival.
If you want to hear more about the trials and tribulations of Pastor Art Puloski and to support his legal battle with the province for religious freedom, free speech, and the right to freely assemble, please visit savearter.com.
And on that website, you can make a tax-deductible donation to Art's legal fees.
Now, as part of the weekly anti-lockdown protest in Calgary that takes place literally in the public square in front of Calgary City Hall, Art organized a Christmas festival wherein he fed the homeless steak.
He gave them other hot food, hot drinks, and in conjunction with other churches, organized warm clothes and offered the homeless Christmas presents.
And Pastor Art was doing this at a time when the city of Calgary limited shelter space to stop the spread of COVID.
Art was giving the homeless resources the city would not.
And that act of kindness and dignity in the Christmas season prompted city bylaw officials to ticket Art for holding an illegal gathering.
Now, the problem for the prosecution in court right now is that even though there were restrictions on gatherings in the province at the time, a recent decision by a court in Alberta ruled that public gatherings like protests outside were not subject to restrictions.
So the question before the judge today was, was a public protest a private social gathering?
And the judge said, no, it's not.
So there was a not guilty finding, and the accused was not convicted under the Public Health Act.
And it's a really great win because what, I mean, the Public Health Act allows for prosecution up to $100,000 fine for attending gatherings or breaching a public health order like the Samoa Charter.
So now the court is trying to say that this event from Art, well, it was exclusively a Christian event, even though the Crown's own witnesses said that nobody checked for belief in Christ before a homeless person was fed or provided a present and that not a single person was turned away.
You could not actually get more of a public event than a public protest in the public town square in front of City Hall, but the city and public health deep state officials here in Alberta, well, they sure want their pound of flesh after Pastor Art Peloski embarrassed them on an international scale for resisting their incursions into his church during the pandemic.
Interestingly enough, the Crown Prosecution Service in Alberta is sparing no expense to go after Art for what will amount to probably a thousand dollar fine if indeed he is convicted.
Yesterday, Tuesday was day two of a three-day trial.
The Crown is calling up to nine witnesses to testify to things that Art already admits that he did.
He just doesn't think that they were illegal.
And this is particularly outrageous since Alberta is short-staffed on prosecutors and it's causing a problem with real charges for real crimes being dropped because they are going beyond the constitutional time limit to get to trial.
Now, on the first day of court, we had Sid Fizzard, our Calgary-based reporter, in the courtroom.
Here's the interview he did with Art after a very long, boring day of hearing the Crown waste time and read evidence into the official record.
The whole thing that we witness right now is it breaks my heart because it's such a such a case of wasting courts time.
I was willing to admit that all the evidence the Crown is presenting of me being there feeding the poor.
Yes, I did it.
I'm not ashamed of it.
I'm willing to stand up in front of the court and say, yes, Your Honor, I did.
I did feed those people.
I still feed them.
And if that deserves a punishment, well, I've done it.
But am I guilty of a crime in our democratic society?
No, I'm not guilty of any crime.
The Crown and the politicians and the whole so-called justice system right now, they are guilty of a crime.
So what a waste of time.
What a waste of taxpayers' money.
Instead of actually chasing real criminals, drug dealers, pimps, you know, human traffickers, people that actually commit real crimes, they are designating this enormous, huge resources into fighting someone that what?
What did I do?
I know what I did.
I embarrassed them.
That's what the whole thing is.
This is vengeance.
This is a pure case of state-focused vengeance.
That's what it is.
And I'm going to still stand up and I'm going to still do my best to save as many lives as possibly I can.
Now, Tuesday afternoon, I was in the court in Calgary all day with rebel news journalist Celine Gallas, who is in the courtroom today, Wednesday.
And she'll have an interview with Art after court is adjourned.
Now, yesterday we heard testimony about the outrageous things that Pastor Art did, like hugging and touching the homeless.
We also heard a peace officer say that she knew Art's gathering broke health restrictions because the people at his event were not from the same household.
They were literally homeless.
Once again, to support Pastor Art Peloski as he fights against the province after the province criminalized human decency towards the homeless during the pandemic, please consider making a donation at savearter.com and donations qualify for a charitable tax receipt through a special partnership with the registered Canadian charity, the Democracy Fund.